You may well have seen examples of the original playbills for the Theatre Royal, Cardiff held at Glamorgan Archives and used to promote performances between 1885 and 1895. During this period the theatre, opened in 1878 and able to seat up to 2000 people, catered for all tastes. The playbill below, however, is a little different in that it is for a series of performances at the Temperance Hall in Merthyr in March 1886. It also signified that something rather special was on offer.
In this case it was The Private Secretary, a comedy that had met with enormous success in London with over 700 performances at the Globe Theatre starring Charles H Hawtrey. Although Hawtrey, who made a considerable fortune from the play, was not performing with the touring party, it was certain to be a very popular choice with the theatregoers of South Wales.
It was no surprise, therefore, that Edward Fletcher, manager of the Theatre Royal, seized on the opportunity to present the play in both Cardiff and Merthyr. The Temperance Hall, first opened in 1852, had been extended in 1873 and it was claimed that it could hold up to 4000 people. While used for both religious and political meetings, it was also Merthyr’s main theatre. It was, therefore, the perfect venue for the play. Although we do not have reviews of the Merthyr performances, it is likely that they would have been similar to the reception in Cardiff where it was described as …one of the most successful modern farcical comedies… [with] …laughter continuous throughout.
The plot of the Private Secretary centred on two young men attempting to escape their creditors. In many ways it echoed Hawtrey’s life. Knighted in 1922, Hawtrey was hailed as the leading comedy actor of his generation and a mentor for many, including Noel Coward. He also appeared in a number of the first silent movies and was a successful theatre manager. However, he was bankrupted on several occasions as a result of gambling debts. Looking back on his life he said:
I had one bet and lost half a crown, and I have been trying for 50 years to win it back.
With a ticket for a reserved seat priced at three shillings, the income from the Merthyr performances would have been very welcome and probably needed.
As to the Temperance Hall, it served for many years as a theatre and cinema, known in more recent years as the Scala Cinema. It closed in the mid 1980s when it was converted into a snooker club.
The playbill for the Private Secretary is held at Glamorgan Archives, reference D452/1/30. It can be accessed on line at http://calmview.cardiff.gov.uk/.
This article is reproduced with the kind permission of the Glamorgan Archives. To view the original, please follow the link below.
In 1850, a group of worshippers at Wesley Chapel at Pontmorlais severed connections with the chapel and started to worship in the Temperance Hall, and started a new sect, calling themselves the Wesleyan Reformers.
Foremost amongst the new group was Mr Walter Watkins, and he along with Mr W John, Mr Rees Chandler, Mr George Williams and Mr Richard Harris were instrumental in getting the new cause established.
By 1856, with no sign of the rift with their mother church healing, the congregation decided to build their own chapel in Newcastle Street. Shortly after this a number of members left Zoar Chapel and joined the congregation at Salem, and Rev Thomas Jenkins of Aberaman was ordained as the first minister. The congregation were accepted into the Independent Union at a quarterly meeting of the East Glamorgan Association held at Bethesda Chapel. Rev Jenkins remained at the chapel until 1864 when he emigrated to America.
In 1907, the chapel acquired a house in Newcastle Street, and converted it, at a cost of £700, into a schoolroom.
In 1925 when storms severely damaged the old Morlais Chapel, the Salvation Army Corps met at Salem Chapel, and the elders of the chapel offered the building to the Salvation Army. They declined the offer however as the building was deemed too small for their purposes. By this time the congregation had severely dwindled and in 1930 the chapel closed and the remaining congregation returned to Zoar. The building was then sold to the Temperance Movement and renamed Salem Memorial Hall.
The building has since been used by the Jehovah’s Witness movement, but has now been converted to a house.
Youngsters today might be surprised that there was a time, not a million years ago, when Merthyr was a hub of all kinds of entertainment: several cinemas showing a variety of films, plays being performed by both professional and amateur companies at several venues – not to mention live music at several ‘night spots’.
Below is just an example of what was regularly on in Merthyr – all of these adverts appeared in a single issue of the Merthyr Express 70 years ago today, 21 February 1953…
The above is just a small example of what was going on in Merthyr – there was something new happening every week somewhere up and down the borough. How times have changed.
Do you have any memories of going to any of these places? If so, please share any memories with us.
Today marks the 140th anniversary of the birth of one of Merthyr’s greatest writers – J. O. Francis. To mark the occasion, one of his excellent short essays is transcribed below, following a short introduction by Mary Owen who wrote a marvellous biography of him.
John Oswald Francis (J.O.) was born at 15, Mary Street, Twynyrodyn in 1882, and lived later at 41, High Street, next door to Howfields, when his father, a blacksmith, opened a farrier shop in the busy shopping centre. In 1896 he entered the County Intermediate and Technical School on the day of its opening and benefited greatly, like many others, from the education he received there. It formed the grounding for the rest of his life. A blacksmith’s life was not for him. In 1900, he gained a scholarship to University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, where he graduated with first class honours in English.
He lived for the rest of his life in London, where he was well known as a dramatist, journalist, broadcaster and a popular public speaker. He found fame in 1913 with his play, Change, about ordinary Welsh working-class people and the problems they were facing as changes were taking place in politics, religion and education. It was the first of its kind and gave a new genre to drama, which influenced writers for decades. Although he lived away from Merthyr Tydfil for most of his life, his knowledge of it in his youth inspired him to write about it in the years that followed until his death in 1956. His many short comedies helped to bring about the popularity of amateur dramatics, especially in Glamorgan. He was a pioneer and he became a leading member of the First Welsh National Drama Movement. He was regarded as ‘a distinguished dramatist, ‘a gentle satirist, and ‘always a Merthyr boy’.
Mary Owen
The Railways of Romance
None of us can determine which of the impressions we are always unconsciously receiving is being most deeply written on our minds. What abides is, often enough, that which might least be expected to remain. It is, too, sometimes a little incongruous, as if memory were in part jester, playing tricks with recollection – perhaps in kindness – lest the past should have too grim a visage.
Setting up to be a serious and philosophic person, I must confess to some perplexity over my remembrance of South Wales. There is an interloping thought that persists in creeping into the midst of more exalted memories. I cannot think of the high places of my early destiny – my home, my school, the houses of my more generous relations, and the chapel of my juvenile theology – but that a railway station crowds unasked into the mental scene. In the station of that Town of the Martyr in Glamorgan, an there, no doubt, small boys, stealing away from the harsh realities of the High Street, still snatch a fearful joy upon the trolleys, and staring away past the signal box, weave for themselves the figments of young romance.
Merthyr Railway Station in the early 1900s. Photo courtesy of the Alan George Archive
The small boy’s zest in railway stations has, I may argue in self-defence, a basis in the deep instincts of humanity. In the old primitive world the barbarian, looking up on the sun, was overwhelmed by a sense of its vast power. He made a god of it, and bowed in reverence. So, also, that unequivocal barbarian, the average small boy, beholds in a railway engine an example of power well within the range of his understanding. It is, perhaps, the same old instinct of adoration that kindles in every healthy youngster his burning desire to be a railway-guard.
Even in this riper stage, when life holds joys more attractive than the right to blow the whistle and to jump authoritatively upon a moving train, I find that a railway station can still exercise a certain lure. To every good Welshman, Paddington and Euston are wondrous places. He may not be one of the happy pilgrims, but it is a pleasure merely to look at carriages that go out under such banners as “Cardiff”, “Fishguard”, “Aberystwyth”, “Dolgelley” or “Barmouth”, and if he is not quite a curmudgeon he can find a vicarious delight in the blessedness of those departing.
But Paddington and Euston have a strenuous air. They do not encourage people to loiter upon trolleys and watch the pageant of the trains. In that station of the Martyr’s Town there was more tolerance. Over Paddington and Euston it had also this other advantage – it did not monotonously receive and despatch the rolling-stock of a single company. Oh, no! It had trains in a variety that I have never since seen equalled. Almost all the lines in Glamorgan gathered to it, just as all paths are said to lead to Rome.
Simply to enumerate the companies that sent their trains to pause under that grimy but catholic roof is to recover something of the rapture of the schoolboy “with shiny morning face”. We had the “Great Western” and the “Taff”; the “London North Western”, the “Rhymney”, and the “Brecon and Merthyr”. I am sorry that, by some kindly roundabout way, the Barry Railway did not run in also. But I am sure that it was then much more than a project.
We small boys of the station-hunting breed knew the different types of engine point by point. We had each of us a favourite. Bitter indeed were our disputes on the question of comparative worth, and devotion went occasionally to the chivalry of fisticuffs. Squeaky voices were raised in partisan abuse. Young eyes shone with the light of a noble championship. (Grown-up people, I have since learnt, land themselves in the law courts for issues less important than those falsetto controversies).
The engine of each company had its own characteristic quality, fully appreciated in our loving study after school hours and in the joyous emancipation of Saturday. The “Great Western” arrived from some vague place called “Swansea” – made after the “local” model, and with its well-known “tick, tick!” rather like a stout lady in a dark-green costume catching her breath after exhausting movement. To many of us the “Taff” was the most impressive of them all. I daresay that on a general suffrage, with a secret ballot to nullify the influence of some of our brawnier members, the “Taff” would have been voted the finest thing that ever went on wheels. How big and burly was the “Taff” engine as it swung past the signal box! How cheerfully it whistled, and how inevitably did it suggest a robust representation of John Bull!
Often did we wonder what would happen if it failed to stop before it reached the buffers. About our expectant platform hung the legend of a day when an engine had crashed right through and gone in mad career almost to the door of the Temperance Hall without. But not for us were such catastrophes! They were the story of an older era, a reminiscence of giants before the flood.
An old print showing the terrible accident mentioned above at Merthyr Station on 16 May 1874
Below is an example of some the varied entertainment that was available in Merthyr in years gone by. All of these adverts appeared in the Merthyr Express 70 years ago today.
John Oswald Francis (J.O.) was born at 15, Mary Street, Twynyrodyn in 1882, and lived later at 41, High Street, next door to Howfields, when his father, a blacksmith, opened a farrier shop in the busy shopping centre. In 1896 he entered the County Intermediate and Technical School on the day of its opening and benefited greatly, like many others, from the education he received there. It formed the grounding for the rest of his life. A blacksmith’s life was not for him. In 1900, he gained a scholarship to University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, where he graduated with first class honours in English. 
